Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Freedom of speech has never been the freedom to speak without consequence. Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, harassment, intimidation, imprisonment or violence. But speech, like anything we do, has real life consequences. There is no freedom of speech if people are allowed to talk and others are not allowed to object to what they've said.

This weekend, famous philosopher, author and university professor Roger Scruton was
relegated to the obscurity of the BBC News website (link to text) and BBC Radio 4 (link to audio) to
talk about freedom of speech. He seems about to explore the potential ills of criminalising hate speech before meandering in an entirely different direction, concluding.

“Of
course, we have moved on a bit from the Middle Ages. It is not the
man who is assassinated now, but only his character. But the effect
is the same. Free discussion is being everywhere shut down, so that
we will never know who is right - the heretics, or those who try to
silence them.”

I
was obliged to study Roger Scuton's work as a young philosophy
student, so I feel qualified to translate:

“Of
course, we have moved on a bit from the Middle Ages. Outspoken men I
personally relate to don't get assassinated, but instead the views of
other kinds of people are heard alongside ours, which can make us
look ridiculous. Free discussion is everywhere, and views like mine
face powerful and articulate opposition.”

Freedom of speech means that Roger
Scruton should be free to express his views without harassment, intimidation, violence and so forth. He has arguably earned the right to have far
greater access to public platforms - television appearances,
newspaper articles and so on – than someone like me. I might
disagree with pretty much everything he stands for but that's not a
problem – here he is, right now, helping me explain an idea to you. Thanks Rodge! .

What
Roger Scruton is absolutely not entitled to is to express his views
without criticism. For example, he describes how homophobia was invented (as most
words were at some point) and is used to ruthlessly attack, um, homophobia:

“The
orthodox liberal view is that homosexuality is innate and guiltless.
Like the Islamists, the advocates of this view have invented a phobia
with which to denounce their opponents. Deviate in the smallest
matter from the orthodoxy, and you will be accused of homophobia and,
although this is not yet a crime, it is accompanied, especially for
those with any kind of public office, by real social costs. “

And
yet, here is Roger Scruton, on the BBC News website, implying opinions that are already in the public record; to his credit, he overcame much of his earlier prejudice, but he still objects to same-sex marriage or adoption. And yet this weekend, he was still being published on the BBC News website in a piece to be broadcast on the radio. When Scruton speaks of “real social costs”, I can only assume his lesbian friend didn't invite him to her wedding.

(Incidentally, Scruton is the co-author of the articleSame-sex marriage is homophobic. So he's right about at least some people abusing the word homophobia for the sake of their own particular arguments.)

This
is how history works. When I was a kid, homophobic views were widespread and
freely expressed. In 1989, Scruton himself wrote that society was correct in instilling a revulsion of homosexuality in children - some of his contemporaries said and wrote far worse. Section 28, which effectively prohibited the discussion of homosexuality in schools, was not repealed until four years after I had left school. When I was growing up, someone who supported
same-sex marriage had the right to say so – they certainly wouldn't
have been arrested for it - but they would have struggled to get any kind
of platform outside LGBT magazines. Gay and bisexual teachers, let alone people in
positions of more significant power and status were still frequently
closeted. That's real social costs.

But our society had an argument and the argument was won. Not that we have achieved consensus, but most people either support or are indifferent towards same sex marriage. Conscientious people like Scruton have found at least some of their prejudice to be intellectually unsustainable. This is
because gender doesn't make any moral difference to sex, romantic
partnership or the creation of families. Homophobia – including, violent homophobia – still exists within our culture, although it is much more often subtle and implicit. Scruton's views are in the minority. He still has a very loud voice.
He just can't expect such a great applause whenever he uses it.

To say so isn't silencing him. To bombard him with abusive messages would be silencing. To threaten his peace or his person
would be silencing. To hack the BBC News website and take down his
article would be silencing. He's not being silenced.

Scruton may well have been harassed about his views, but he doesn't describe this. He doesn't describe any specific negative effect of speaking out until he arrives at Nobel-prize winning biochemist Tim Hunt. Like the rest of us, Hunt was not entitled to say whatever he liked without his words having consequences. His character was not
assassinated – he made a fool of himself, just as surely as if he had turned up to work drunk in his underpants. Nobody accused him of a
crime or of any underhand activity other than undermining the status
of women in science with sexist jokes said in public.

"A lifetime of distinguished creative work has ended in ruin." is a wild exaggeration; the chap resigned at the tender age of 72, he may well work again and few history books will record anything but his contribution to science. We're still talking about it now because it happened this year and stirred up a lot of existing frustration about the treatment of women in science. To my knowledge, Hunt was not harassed or threatened, but merely laughed at. A lot. He had claimed female colleagues kept falling in love with him. It's no hanging offence, but no-one can say that and not look like a prong.

It's
funny Scruton's piece should be published in a week that a very
different heretic (and one who has done far more to earn that title)
Germaine Greer made a stand for the voiceless by appearing on fringe
news outlet, BBC Newsnight, complaining about a petition to stop her
talking at Cardiff University, because of her widely published
transphobic views. This was a petition – people exercising their own freedom of speech - asking that she should be no-platformed. Student Unions are not obliged to provide platforms and audiences for anyone who feels they have something to say.

Cardiff University said they did not endorsed Greer's views but would not stop her speaking.Greer decided not to go. She would have been met by a far smaller audience than
that of Newsnight or the many other news outlets who have published
both her complaints about Free Speech, as well as her hateful remarks about
transgender women in the last few days (including the front page of
the BBC News website, up and left a bit from Scruton).

Greer has the right to say what she likes, but not wherever she likes. Nobody has, but Greer has far more opportunities to air her views to huge numbers of people than I ever will. What Greer has experienced is, ironically, exactly the same minimal harm she claims to be committing against transgender people when she denies their very existence; hurt feelings.

The
fact that people with as diverse views as Greer and Scruton could be
making these complaints and so loudly, when nobody who objects to
their views is being heard (Show me a prominent article about the
ills of homophobia this weekend. Where is the interview with Rachel Melhuish who set up the petition against Greer's talk?),
suggests something about the way freedom of speech currently works in
our culture.

So let's talk about actual
silencing. I write quite a lot about discriminatory language and the
media and much of this comes down to people shouldn't say that.
Language is tremendously important. The way women, men and minorities are
spoken about and represented is tremendously important.

When I say, “People shouldn't say that.”
I absolutely mean it. This isn't the same as saying "People shouldn't be allowed to say that." let alone "People should be arrested for saying that."

However, people
should be criticised for saying foolish things - this is part of freedom of speech. Sometimes, public
figures should lose their jobs over the things they say – the rest
of us run exactly the same risk and are likely to meet with far less
tolerance. However, fundamentally, I want to win these arguments. I
want to help persuade folk to treat others as they would like to be
treated.

This has limits and those limits should be obvious. I
didn't think very hard when I became the Goldfish with my painting of
a goldfish as an avatar, but over the years I've become acutely aware
of the way that I escape the abuse that other women with feminine
handles and photos of themselves routinely experience when they talk
about any political issue. Young women, women of colour, women
pictured wearing headscarves and trans women are targeted with
particular bile and there's reason to believe they have less recourse to justice.

Harassment
and abuse are always unacceptable and should be far more vigorously
prosecuted. These things force victims to change their behaviour and
create a genuine obstacle to speaking out. For some minorities –
particularly trans people and Muslim women – the high probability
of receiving abuse any time they draw attention to themselves may be
enough to keep them quiet.

Criticism - even unreasonable, lazy or incoherent criticism - doesn't have this effect. Nobody wants to be called a bigot, and Scruton has personally demonstrated that not everyone uses words like homophobia (or racism, sexism etc.) in a consistent and coherent way, but being told one's speech is prejudiced cannot be compared to threats
of violence, personal and sexualised insults and so on.

Meanwhile, this last week, while Scruton and Greer were speaking without opposition in the national press, it was announced that there will be a new register, like the Sex Offenders Register, which would prevent anyone with a conviction or civil order for "extremism" from working with children or young people. Nobody is clear quite what "extremism" is. We already have disasters like the Prevent Strategy which basically monitors young Muslims for signs of alienation or radicalisation, including what they say in public. And earlier this month, not at all famous Bahar Mustafa was charged for offenses apparently relating to her use of the hashtag #killallwhitemen on Twitter*, while the very famous Katie Hopkins, who wrote of refugees as "cockroaches" who should be gunned down or drowned before they reached Europe, faces no criminal action.

Obviously, I don't mean to suggest that we should only care about certain kinds of silencing, or extreme cases where people are menaced into silence. Nor do I believe that one has no right to complain of ill treatment if someone else is experiencing worse (someone always is). However, I do think it is worth observing that there are patterns in the people and opinions which do get sidelined, shouted down or even draw the attention of the criminal justice system.

Freedom of speech is a vital aspect of a free society and something we may always have to fight for. To reduce it to the freedom for powerful people to express their prejudices without meeting the disapproval and criticism of others only distracts from and undermines the real battle taking place.

* The nature of this kind of case is that the press cannot report exactly what Bahar Mustafa said that was so offensive, given that it is being described as "grossly offensive" in the charges. It may be that she did say something absolutely outrageous (#killallwhitemen is very difficult to take seriously).

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

This conversational game, common among young teenagers, had two separate sets of rules for me. At school, the game was an exercise in vanity and flattery; which actor was basically the older, more gorgeous version of you? If you struggled to name one, friends would make flattering suggestions; being a tall, brown-haired white girl, I should naturally have been played by Julia Roberts. Among my youth theatre friends, the game was about identifying which actor (if any) had the colossal talent required to depict the full melodrama of your life. Few have such a range, darling! A young Diana Rigg might have pulled it off, but barely!

I still think about this game occasionally, when I reflect on the fact that people in movies never look anything like me. Foz Meadows recently described this as The Perfect Hair Problem; women on screen vary so little in their appearance that they usually have the very same hairstyle, and that hairstyle remains perfect, come rain, shine or zombie apocalypse. Women on screen are overwhelmingly white, thin and without visible impairments, even more so than men. There are more transgender women than trans men on screen, but these numbers are minute and of course, they're often not played by actual trans women.

Women on screen are also overwhelmingly young. Even female characters who you'd expect to be middle-aged in real life - experts, senior managers and politicians, high-ranking police officers, the mothers of adult characters and the partners of middle-aged men - are played by inexplicably young women. Angelina Jolie is just a year older than Colin Farrell but was cast as his mother in Alexander. However, often middle aged women characters who might exist (especially mothers), have conveniently died before the start of the film. Occasionally - although the practice is far more common in the theatre – a middle aged or older woman might even be played by a man (the St Trinians movies, Hairspray, Orlando etc.).

A big part of the problem is about story-telling. You notice things like perfect hair far more when a character is actually written like a real person who would not have perfect hair. In the movie of my life, there's only one woman who has perfect, long, shiny and mechanically-straightened hair and even then only some of the time. Often, however, I find myself watching a movie, understanding that the (only significant) female character is not a character at all, but an object, a sexy lamp, the girl. It's not that she must be beautiful in a very particular way because she is eye-candy so much as the fact she needs to look like that so we recognise what she is. She can't be black or a wheelchair-user, not because audiences won't find such a woman as attractive but because the girl is never black, let alone a wheelchair-user. If this woman just wore glasses and kept them on her face throughout a movie (as opposed to taking them off as she comes out of her shell), it might start a revolution.

When we talk about the visual representation of minorities and women, the issues of story-telling, casting and the cultural baggage that goes with it are intermingled. One of the reasons folk were so upset about Eddie Redmayne’s casting as Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything was that, even before the film was made, it was obvious both what kind of movie it would be and how it would be received. Redmayne was destined for critical acclaim, not for his courageous attempt to portray extraordinary genius, but for putting his able-bodied self into the position of a wheelchair-user. It didn’t really matter how well he imitated Hawking’s physical mannerisms because nobody really cares – he just had to look uncomfortable enough, disabled enough, and he was bound to be lauded. In Redmayne’s next biopic, he’s playing transgender pioneer Lili Elbe. Rinse and repeat.

Although there’s no serious argument for casting actors with the same sexual orientation as their characters, the pattern is the same with gay male characters, as with transgender women and disabled men: Non-disabled, cisgender, straight white men routinely play gay men, disabled men and transgender women in epic, often tragic movies which invite massive critical acclaim. The Fast Show’s parody of Forest Gump is almost twenty years old but the same movie is still being made right now:

Meanwhile, the most common objection to casting an actor with visible impairments to play a disabled role is that the character has to be non-disabled for some scenes, as was the case with Theory of Everything. This is only because almost every damn story with a disabled protagonist features the acquisition of impairment as a central dramatic narrative. Disability remains a metaphor for film-makers, rather than an incidental aspect of a character's life. I hope that, come an occasion for my biopic to be made, my getting sick will be the least interesting event of my life. It's already fairly low on the list.

Casting can't be about perfect authenticity. In the film of my life, someone with my particular condition would struggle to act in a film - I certainly couldn't play myself and my impersonation is seamless. However, this is about the representation of disabled people as a social group. We're all invisible for the same reason and the visibility of one of us benefits us all. As well as everyone else, who gets to see us as people rather than symbols.

Rigorous realism only matters when realism means representation. When they cast 5’7” Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, a character who is 6’5” in the books, movie-makers weren’t contributing to an ongoing under-representation of tall men (in fact, very tall men are over-represented, while very-almost-average height Cruise is widely mocked for being a short-arse). Fans of the books may have a complaint but tall men do not. However, when the movie Stonewall, supposed to be depicting the Stonewall Riots, invents a macho young white cisgender male hero and sidelines the real-life trans women, lesbians and femme gay men of colour, well that's a scandalous erasure. See also from this year, Aloha, a film set on Hawaii with only white protagonists, including a white woman who, conveniently, is not supposed to look like she possesses the Chinese and Pacific Islander heritage of her character.

One of the problems we have is that campaigns around representation fail to take an intersectional approach. I often see articles about the casting of non-disabled actors in disabled roles which insist that nobody would stand for this being done to people of colour - "blacking up" is a thing of the past. And yet, routinely, characters of colour are either erased in novel adaptations or historic dramas or played by actors with much paler skins. Ridley Scott defended his Exodus: Gods and Kings (a film where Ancient Egypt is run by white people);

"I
can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax
rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so
from such-and-such, I’m just not going to get it financed."

In
other words, it’s a racist world, so even massively powerful, rich
and influential film-makers are compelled to be racist. We hear the same arguments made about the casting of all marginalised people. These actors are not well-known because they're not often cast so we can't cast them now because they're not well-known.

Frankly, any deviation from the perfect-haired women and more various but still rather samey men would be of benefit to the majority of us who don't see ourselves on screen. Whenever I see prominent women of colour, short, fat, trans or older women in movies, I feel better - any kind of diversity suggests there might be room in this visual universe for me. When I see prominent visibly disabled women on screen (once every five years or so), I feel more like a real person.

In this post I've concentrated on film because television does much better. Television increasingly features transgender people in trans roles, far more incidental disabled characters and greater ethnic diversity than you'll see at the cinema. British television especially features a far more diverse variety of women fulfilling a variety of roles. It's not a perfect medium, but it demonstrates time and again that audiences don't switch off when a drama doesn't look like every other drama before it.

Friday, May 01, 2015

Thanks very much to everyone who helped to spread the word and to those who have already taken part.

If you have a post for Blogging Against Disablism, please leave a comment including the URL (web address) of your post and the catergory your post fits best. Please also link back here, wherever possible (we're at http://tinyurl.com/BADday2015).

We'll carry on updating this post as any late-comers arrive. We've also been posting links to every blog using the Twitter stream @BADDtweets and these will automatically be posted onto our Facebook Page.

Other Access Issues(Posts about any kind of access issue in the built environment, shops, services and various organisations. By "access issues" I mean anything which enables or disenables a person from doing what everyone else is able to do.)

Disablism Interacting with Other 'Isms'(Posts about the way in which various discriminations interact; the way that the prejudice experienced as a disabled person may be compounded by race, gender, age, sexuality etc..)

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

The tenth annual Blogging Against Disablism day will be on Friday, 1st May 2015. This is the day where all around the world, disabled and non-disabled people blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination (known as disablism or ableism). In this way, we hope to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we've made.

How to take part.

1. Post a comment below to say you intend to join in. I will then add you to the list of participants on the sidebar of this blog. Everyone is welcome.

2. Spread the word by linking to this site (http://tinyurl.com/BADD2015), displaying our banner and/ or telling everyone about it on blogs, newsgroups, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and so on (we are using the hashtag #badd2015). The entire success of Blogging Against Disablism Day depends entirely on bloggers and readers telling other bloggers and readers in advance.

3. Write a post on the subject of disability discrimination, disablism or ableism and publish it on May 1st - or as close as you are able. Podcasts, videos and on-line art are also welcome. You can cover any subject, specific or general, personal, social or political. In the previous nine BADD, folks have written about all manner of subjects, from discrimination in education and employment, through health care, parenting, family life and relationships, as well as the interaction of disablism with racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Every year I have been asked, so it's worth saying; the discrimination experienced by people with mental ill health is disablism, so naturally posts about that are welcome.

Blogging Against Disablism Day is not a carnival of previously published material. The point about doing this around one day (or there abouts) is that it is a communal effort and all the posts connect to one another. You can of course use your own post to promote other things you've written in the past as you wish.

4. Come back here to Diary of a Goldfish on the day to let everyone know that you've posted and to check out what other people have written. I shall post links to everyone's posts (slowly) throughout the day, creating an archive. However, I do need you to comment and leave the URL of your post or else I shan't find your post and won't be able to link to it.

We have both a Twitter account @BADDtweets and a Facebook Page where there will be notifications of new posts and updates to the archive during the day.

Accessibility

Naturally, Blogging Against Disablism Day invites contributions from people with all variety of impairments and none at all. You are welcome to contribute with podcasts, video-blogging or anything else that allows you to take part. And whilst May 1st is when this all takes place, nobody who happens to have a bad day that Friday is going to be left out of the archive.

If anyone has any questions about web accessibility, I recommend the Accessify Forum. I am not an expert on web accessibility myself, so if there are any suggestions about how I can make this day more accessible, please e-mail me at diaryofagoldfish at googlemail.com

The Linguistic Amnesty

Whilst discussions about language and the way it can be used to oppress or empower us are more than welcome, please respect the language that people use, particularly to describe themselves in their own contributions. We all have personal preferences, there are cultural variations and different political positions which affect the language we use. Meanwhile, non-disabled contributors can become nervous about using the most appropriate language to use, so please cut everyone as much slack as possible on the day.

At the same time, do not feel you have to use the same language that I do, even to talk about "disablism". If you prefer to blog against disability discrimination, ableism or blog for disability equality, then feel free to do so.

I've written a basic guide to the Language of Disability which I hope might explain some of the thinking behind the different language disabled people prefer to use about themselves.

Links and Banners

To link back to this post, simply copy and paste the following code:

These banners have seemed popular over the last couple of years and I am yet to think of anything better. If anyone fancies editing these images or coming up with something new, then please do so. You are free to use and mess with these as you like, so long as you use them in support of Blogging Against Disablism Day. If you already have the banner, you just need to change the URL that it links to from last year's BADD. Otherwise, you simply need to copy the contents of one of these boxes and paste it on your blog, in a post or on the sidebar as you like. The banners come in two colour combinations and two sizes. The sizes are a 206 pixels square or 150 x 200 pixels.

This is the black and white banner which reads "Blogging Against Disablism". Here's the code for the square one:

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Alistair Campbell wrote an article condemning media speculation about the mental health of Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings co-pilot who, it would seem, deliberately crashed a plane into a mountain, killing 150 people on board. Campbell's article is entitled

It has been widely shared in my circles, but I keep thinking, "Yeah, we would."

If the guy had cancer, there would have quickly developed a narrative in which, raging against his fate and embittered against the world, the chap decided to end it all and take everyone else with him. This is the basis for almost every disabled super-villain in comics and movies. When they're not warming our hearts, we expect people with physical illness to be angry, bitter and to love life and other people a whole lot less.

The media treatment of depression is significantly worse because it treats this diagnosis - a very commonplace, highly variable condition - as if that explains everything. The guy was (probably) depressed. What more do we need to know?

With cancer, the speculators would have had to expand on that - "He obviously thought the cancer was coming back" or "He was angry that he would die in his twenties while other people would experience all kinds of things he would never get to".

There wouldn't have been headlines which implied that people with cancer should never be allowed in the cockpit of an aeroplane (or presumably, in any of the many positions of great responsibility people with various illnesses regularly occupy).
But narratives in which we use physical illness and impairment to explain violence and self-destruction are not uncommon.

Way too often, in describing some oppression, a minority is identified who would never receive such ill-treatment. There were a lot of articles about cripping-up - non-disabled actors playing disabled characters, usually to overblown critical acclaim - following Eddie Redmaine's Oscar win for his role as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Many of these articles stated that blackface is a thing of the dim and distant past; you'd never see a white actor play a black character, so why are disabled people so oppressed? Of course, the corpse of blackface continues to twitch, while white or mixed race actors are routinely cast in historical or fictional roles whose time and geography would suggest black or Asian characters. Meanwhile other groups - like transgender people - get to see themselves represented by their own people even less often.

The mental illness vs. physical illness nonsense is especially disparaging because it demonstrates what an extremely low bar mental health campaigns tend to reach for. They want mental illness to be treated just like physical illness. Being more ambitious, I'd like mental illness to be treated as a morally neutral personal experience, not a symbol or a story, a quirk or a weakness. Many people are able to see it as just that. Culturally, we have a way to go.

Sometimes, people are too sick to work. All kinds of illness, all kinds of work. This doesn't always mean such people don't come into work. They may do so because:

We live in a culture which treats paid employment as the minimum criteria for a decent and valuable human being.

We live in a culture which treats all illness, but especially mental illness, as personal weakness.

Employers are often freaked out by illness, especially mental illness.

People don't always know how sick they are.

Other people, including doctors, don't always know how sick a person is.

In other words, even those who are convinced that a diagnosis of depression poses a significant risk need to care about the further stigmatization of mental illness. And all other illness, because our culture encourages folk to push themselves and take risks where physical or mental collapse could lead to disaster.

However, depression is entirely inadequate as an explanation for Andreas Lubnitz's actions. Even in the most severe suicidal depression, there's a huge difference between being careless of other people's safety (e.g. stepping in front of a train, driving into traffic) and purposely harming others (e.g. crashing the plane you're piloting).

Monday, March 23, 2015

I had read that you should try to write fiction
with just one particular reader in mind, even if your reader is an entirely imaginary
person. It’s a mistake, I read, to write for a broad audience. It’s easy, I
read (and found out for myself) to get distracted by the idea of different
people reading your work. You can’t please everyone. You may shock, annoy or
offend some of them. And you don’t want to write the book that wouldn't
shock, annoy or offend anyone at all.

Instead, I read, you should identify someone who you think
will really enjoy what you’re trying to do. If you don’t know anyone like this, invent them. Make them up and keep them in mind.

I didn't know anyone like that, so I made them up; my
imaginary ideal reader. Not someone who would unquestioningly adore every word
I wrote, but someone who would love what I wanted to achieve.
I made them up and kept them in my mind. They were quite appealing to me so they became
a secondary character in my novel, a love interest in a rather unromantic book.

I made them up. Then a friend sent me to their blog.

………..

My novel was near completion when 2010 came around. I had
worked so hard, for so long, with so many damn set-backs. There had been
periods of months where I couldn't write, because I was too sick or because all
my energy was otherwise spoken for.
There had been periods of months where I couldn't write because my
confidence had been comprehensively flattened. And now, finally, I was nearly
there.

A satellite image of the UK in January 2010.

This was a long, hard winter, the coldest in my life time. There
was snow about for weeks. My then husband had had an
argument with his family at Christmas and was spiraling into depression. In
January, my friend Jack died suddenly – the third friend who, having enthused
about my writing and looking forward to my completed novel, had died before I
was done (I’m putting this in the context of my novel-writing; this was not my
first, second or third thought on hearing of Jack’s untimely death). This was
the year I would turn thirty and I started doing a Project 365, taking a photograph every day.

There was something else going on. I would like to say
that a rational calculation was taking place, but it wasn't. I would like to
say that I was beginning to stand up for myself, but I wasn't. I often say, of this time,
that my marriage was falling apart, but I didn't know that. Not yet.

I was very
happy. I was not happy. I felt extraordinary well-loved; for much of my adult
life, I’d been lonely, believing I was little more than a convenience or a useful ear to my friends, but that had all changed. Despite pessimism from my
then husband (nobody
will turn up and I’ll have to pick up the pieces!), I was planning a thirtieth
birthday party with my three close friends. Two of them were old friends
by then, but I’d only recently realised what that meant.

And thus, I felt full of love, but a love like molten lead; I
was weighed down by it, burning up with it, in danger of starting a fire if I stood
too close to the curtains. Sometimes I basked in the warmth and light of it all. Other
times, I wanted to open a window and scream for help. That last sentence isn't
a metaphor.

The last two blog posts I wrote before I finished my novel were On Not Being Beautiful #1 and #2. These are strange to me now, because what I
wrote is perfectly valid, but I know they are written by someone who is regularly being
told that she has the face of a Klingon, the skin texture of a pizza, her arse takes up all three lanes of the motorway or some variation of the
above. At the same time, she has friends who casually tell her how good she
looks, who greet her “Hello gorgeous!” or sign off e-mails, “Keep smiling,
beautiful.” She's trying to navigate the dissonance.

Everything was rather like this. My friends were excited as I moved
towards the end of my book, while my then husband said I wasn't going to make
it and mocked every error or slur in my speech with, “I thought you were
supposed to be good with words.”

………………

During the last month of novel writing, I went a little mad and this madness was that bloody novel. It sounds dreadfully pretentious -
suffering for my art - and I do know it was completely unnecessary. If my life had been
better, it would have not made me sick and, crucially, my work could have improved. I didn't have to bleed all over the page (metaphor), I didn't have to
go into hell and back just to get the words down (not sure). These days I can
write with greater power and much less pain and mess. Back then, I was in pain. I was a mess.

This is the sort of thing I got up to at this time.(A sort of pyramid made up of white blister packs on top of a wall socket against a redwall. A tiny metal angel looks on.)

I couldn't work all day long, but it became very much harder to shut down my mind or escape into other things. I couldn't sleep when I tried and fell asleep with my
fingers on the keyboard. I lost interest in food. I was sometimes confused about whether I was living in the story of my life or the story I was writing.

I listened to music of flight and music of falling. I did a little yoga every day and always finished playing Otis Redding's cover of (Can't get no) Satisfaction. I played the Cranberries’ No Need To Argue album an
awful lot, just as the daffodils came into bloom.

Other things too, I would understand differently later on; my long exaggerated startle reflex was now ridiculous. Someone could casually approach me, no loud noise, no sudden movement and I would cry out in alarm. Then there were moments of high drama, threats and shouting where I noticed I felt nothing - worse, I was thinking about some trivial aspect of my novel, as if what was happening in the room was some unfathomable soap opera on the TV in the background.

I was also trying to help my then husband, because he was really very unwell. Every day I spend time looking for jokes or funny stories to provide a moment's relief. I rented movies I thought he'd like and watched every one by myself first, in case there was something that would upset or annoy him. At one point, I bought him smiley potato faces in a desperate childish attempt to put a smile on his face.

The night before I finished the novel, I told him that I was starting to panic about the deadline I had set. He responded, “I don’t care.”

The next moment, an e-mail from Stephen; How It Ends by Devotchka. I began to
listen, thinking, Oh god, this is long and I have no time, it’s got accordians in it and I’m going to have to say something polite about it! but then the piano
started. It was oddly perfect. I listened to it on repeat as I worked. In the
morning, I played it again four or five times until I got up the courage to send
the long rambling e-mail I’d been writing, complete with a 144,000 word file
attached.

In this e-mail, I tried to tactfully address the fact that Stephen might recognise himself in one of the characters, but he mustn't read anything into it. After all, Stephen has a different reason to walk with a stick and references Dawn of the Dead rather than Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town as an allegory for human endurance. The personalities may be identical, but I wrote all that before I knew him. I made him up! I don't want Stephen to think I am secretly in love with him or anything.

It is Sunday morning; Mother’s Day 2010. I take this screen grab
and put it on Flickr. Only one other person, apart from Stephen and I will see it and know what it means. But I am compelled to make some
public record.

Then I click send.

Everything has changed. I've written a novel. I am not the
same person I was yesterday, when I hadn't written a novel.

Stephen e-mails me with photographic evidence of my novel safely on his e-reader. He then sends the Thomas Truax cover of I’m Deranged
in response to that weird rambling e-mail. Half
an hour later, he e-mails to tell me he’s read the first chapter. He's loving
it so far.

(An e-reader held in a hand.)

I haven’t mentioned the fact that I've finished my novel to
the man I am inexplicably still married to; I really hoped he would ask.
But I tell him that Stephen's read the first chapter. No congratulations. He says, “Sure he’s not on top of a
tall building, about to throw himself off to avoid reading the rest?”

My then husband is thinking about death a lot and imagines I have
the same effect on everyone.

It’s Mothers Day. I must spend time with my mother.

My parents and I go to my cousin’s house,
where we have a meal with two cousins and an aunt (we’re supposed to be eating
with my Granny, since it’s Mother’s Day, but we've managed to mislay her). We
catch up with what was happening with everyone’s life, apart from mine. We talk
about my sister, brother-in-law and nephew, we talk about other cousins, their
partners, aunts and uncles, we talk about Granny and the great uncles and
aunts. Even a couple of second cousins are mentioned at one point. Nobody asks
me a damn thing.

I notice this - I do notice it, from time to time, the way my
family believes I have absolutely no life to speak of - but I especially notice
today because I’m thinking,

This is the most important day of my life!

This really is. I consider blurting out, “I just
written my first novel!” but I don’t. And to be honest, it’s just good
to be out of the house and away from everything, to hear about other people's lives and dramas. People write books; it's not all that extraordinary. It's just extraordinary that I should.

It’s also good to have some time away from my laptop where I might anxiously await e-mails from Stephen. When I get back, he's e-mailing to complain that he had a sleep during the day and my book gave him nightmares.

The produce of my imagination has entered another person's subconscious.

…………

On the Monday, while Stephen is still reading my novel, my
then husband and I have a big talk. He tells me that he doesn't love me anymore. I am boring, unattractive and very difficult to live with. He knows he’s depressed and things may well change in time, so there's no point doing anything about it right now.

I have heard something like this before, several times. The routine is that I go on a sort of probation; try harder, avoid
pissing him off so much and after a while, I will say I love you and I’ll get
it back: “I love you too.”

But this time, I take it badly. A big chunk of the lovely
awful molten lead inside me breaks off, leaving a deep physical pain, a gaping
aching space in my chest where there should be no space. I weep. It is like
witnessing a death, the totality of loss I feel.

Yet, straight away, I feel lighter.
Lighter in a lost and listless way, but definitely lighter.

A friend and I have talked about me staying with her in Wales for a week sometime. I call her and we make a proper plan.

…………

On the Tuesday, Stephen finishes reading my novel. We talk
on Skype for about two hours. He loves it. He is brimming with praise and talk of the bits that scared, moved or amused him. He is so proud of me, he gets a little choked up saying so. There are issues with pacing. There are a shameful number of
typos. There are a few points of slight confusion. But he loves it.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

I’ve been thinking about bodies, metaphor and identity, in
the context of two very different stories; J K Rowling’s
The Casual Vacancy and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Out The Bodies
(the same story over two books). Both have been given recent BBC TV adaptations where prominent fat characters have been played by fairly slim actors, which is
undoubtedly why they have been on my mind.

This is how J K Rowling introduces the patriarchal character
of Howard Mollinson in her novel, The Casual Vacancy:

He was an extravagantly
obese man of sixty-four. A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of
his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first
clapped eyes on him; wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it, how
he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed. Partly
because his physique set off these trains of thought, and partly because of his
fine line in banter, Howard managed to discomfort and disarm in almost equal
measure, so that customers almost always bought more than they meant to on a
first visit to the shop.

I like this, but you know, I don’t like it. Then, as the
book goes on and we’re not allowed to forget how very fat Howard is, I like it even less. Howard’s fatness represents his greed; he is a glutton and a lech, he is hungry for power and influence.
He has a disgusting rash under his belly, he takes up space and tax-payer's money.

In much the same way, we know that Uriah Heap is ghoulish before
he speaks or moves because he looks like a ghoul. Except even that was David Copperfield's own impression.

Another fat man with a game-changing penis is Henry VIII in
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Out The Bodies. Mantel is at a great
advantage with Henry on two counts. First of all, she didn’t – couldn’t –
invent his body. She didn’t choose his red hair, his colossal height, his
increasing girth or his gammy leg. Secondly, most of us have a fairly clear
vision of what Henry VIII looked like. Thus, there is no passage where Mantel says, Here
is a man called King Henry; here is what he looks like. His appearance, however, is mentioned often:

How colourful Henry is! How like the king in a new pack of
cards!

When he sees Henry draw his bow, he thinks, I see now, he is royal.

A broad man, a high man, Henry dominates any room. He
would do it even if God had not given him the gift of kingship.

Is the king’s head becoming
bigger? Is that possible in mid-life?

Henry is overwhelming. He is, both literally and figuratively, the biggest man around. His clothes and physical mannerisms serve to make him seem larger and brighter.

There are other important bodies in these books; the
body of Catherine of Aragon is deemed too old to play her role of bearing children. The body
of Ann Boleyn, so desired by Henry, is criticised by her enemies as
undesirable; she is flat-chested, she is a “goggle-eyed whore”. Princess Mary is
unsuitable as an heir, both as a woman, and because she is small; a “dwarf”. Even toddler Princess
Elizabeth, sharing her hair colour with her father, is described as a “ginger
brat”.

But all of this information is delivered in the words and thoughts of characters. Mantel never tells us what people look
like but instead, how they are seen. Sometimes, how they see themselves.

When J K Rowling invented lustful lingerie-saleswoman,
Samantha, and teenage sexpot Crystal, the two most sexual and sexualised women
in the novel's universe, she also made them the only two women with notably big
breasts (Samantha even has sexual fantasies in which she is conscious of what her enormous breasts look like to her lover). The romantically desperate social worker, Kay, has
stocky thighs. Lovelorn teenager Andrew,
beaten by his father and exploited by his far more confident best friend, has extensive facial acne.

Rowling does sometimes place visual descriptions in the minds or words of characters, but often she uses the authorial voice. Most people see a fat man and think about his penis.

The character of Tessa, described as “overweight”
(that's a BMI of between 26 and 30, in case you were vague about what that looks like), sits looking at Heat Magazine in a doctor’s waiting room:

She remembered telling a sturdy little girl in Guidance that looks did not matter, that personality was much more important. What
rubbish we tell children, thought Tessa.

Tessa has a point; in this universe, people’s
looks are often physical manifestations of their vices and vulnerabilities*.

My body is part of my identity. I didn't chose my face, but if you see a photograph of it, you see me. My bodily experiences influence who I am. There are folks for whom their bodies are much more or much less part of their identity; some people go to great lengths to express themselves through their looks, while others are largely indifferent. Some people feel trapped inside their bodies, while others revel in every detail of their physical selves.

However, my body is not a metaphor for anything. And goodness knows, people see metaphor in me, in my gender combined with my age, my height, my weight, my breasts, my bum, the length of my legs. People see metaphor in a walking stick or a wheelchair (hardly surprising when it's pretty rare to read fiction where these things are not metaphorical). I know people see metaphor if I wear make-up or not, the length and style of my hair, my clothes and shoes.

I'm not especially worried about the plight of fat, middle-aged white men - they are not underrepresented in the highest echelons of power, they are not a vulnerable group who suffer widespread discrimination or abuse (although they suffer some discrimination and abuse, and the BBC cast Damien Lewis as Henry and Michael Gambon as Howard, presumably because they couldn't find high caliber fat male actors in the right age brackets, presumably because such actors don't usually get a lot of work).

Meanwhile, I am fascinated by the mechanism; I am fascinated by the way rational human beings seek out meaning in accidents of genetics and nutrition. I am fascinated the way that hated figures are seen as ugly - David Cameron is almost eerily unremarkable in his looks, the silver Ford Focus of men, who you wouldn't so much as glance up at on a bus or in a pub. Yet to many of his detractors, he becomes reptilian, his eyes are too close together, his hair is receding comically, his skin is plastic.

People need to tell stories about the way people do this.

We need to avoid telling stories as if this way of thinking is entirely fair.

* When we were talking about this, Stephen reminded me of The Singing Detective, which handles skin disease as perceived punishment for various sins - the body as metaphor, at some considerable length. This is absolutely superb but it is all about how the protagonist understands his body and illness (other characters have different perspectives - other characters apply different metaphors).

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

This morning I thought, "It must be about ten years since I started Diary of a Goldfish." and indeed it is - Sunday was the tenth anniversary of my very first post. I started on the casual suggestion of my brother-in-law, before I ever really read a blog. I feel quite lucky that I plunged into it without much thought - if I had had a particular agenda or theme, it might not have proved so useful.

A lot has happened in ten years. I wrote a novel and am almost done with my second. I got married to the wrong person for the wrong reasons, met Stephen, divorced and married the right person for the right reasons. I learned to paint. I've seen a fair amount of bereavement but I've gained a nephew, niece and a new extended family. I moved home four or five times, depending on how you count it.

As a result of blogging, my words have ended up all over the place; The Guardian, the BBC, education resources, disability studies periodicals. I got my face on the front cover of The Cambridge City News (along with some rescued kittens - it was a real slow news day). I've been invited to join Where's the Benefit? and the F-Word. I never had any ambition to do any kind of non-fiction writing, so it's been great.

I've also made some very good friends and had some very interesting and important conversations. I founded Blogging Against Disablism Day, which I know has come to mean a lot to many people.

However, this blog is really a gift you give to me, dear reader. I don't imagine I'm providing any kind of public service or useful function - it's really nice when something I write is useful or interesting to someone. But the person who has benefited the most from Diary of a Goldfish is me. It's given me lots of writing practice and helped my writing to improve. It has given me a place to express myself, vent and lecture people on subjects that matter to me without awkward social consequences. And I know you're there, in varying numbers, so I can pretend you're hanging on my every word. I sometimes get lovely comments, here and elsewhere and that stuff is huge to me. At a particularly difficult point in my life, I had an A4 print out of the nicest things people had said about my writing.

My blogging has changed a lot in ten years (as the world of blogging has). Earlier on, I was more or less keeping a diary, which was useful because, at the age of twenty-four, I was still struggling to be the protagonist in my own life story. Later on, some of these posts became downright disturbing. While it was going on, nobody knew about the violence in my first marriage and I rarely had to explain anything - my face was never bruised, I never sought medical attention. However, after my divorce, when I went through my archive in order to completely anonymise my first husband, I found that it was as if I had been compelled to write on days where there'd been violence and instead tell a funny or sweet story where no-one got hurt. I was spinning stories to myself, in public. Sometimes I told abject lies - entirely unnecessarily lies.

I find that baffling and weird, even now. I took all these posts down, by the way. There are plenty of posts where I express ideas or opinions I no longer agree with, but I took down anything I found where I actually lied.

There have been a few points where I thought about ditching the blog, possibly starting afresh, but I'm really very attached to it. If I had thought more about my 10th Bloggerversary coming up, I would have prepared a better post.

Stephen suggested that I should post links to my "Top Ten Posts". I don't know if these are my favourites - there's almost a thousand to choose from and I'm not going to spend the next week reading through my entire archive. However as a fairly evenly spread selection (2005 was just too weak):

Thursday, January 08, 2015

The kind if terrorist attack we've come to fear in the West is targeted at random civilians. They attacks our freedom, in so far as they inhibit the freedom of any of us to go about our daily business completely without fear.

But yesterday's massacre at Charlie Hebdo is a specific attack on freedom of expression. It is not a freedom everyone in the world has access to. Even when protected by the law, it is not shared equally in real terms. Some voices are louder than others, some are handed platforms and loud-hailers while others are muffled and overlooked. Yet however imperfect, it is an absolute and fundamental freedom. It is one of the greatest strengths of a liberal democracy.

Yesterday, my Twitter feed featured two rather odd responses to the events in Paris.

There were folks who insisted that satire is always a force for good. There were folks who said things along the lines of, "My idea of equality is that everyone has an equal right to be laughed at."

Some of these were posting Charlie Hebdo cartoons in solidarity. Although the magazine mocks all faiths and political stripes, the most notorious cartoons mock Muslims and the Prophet Mohammed. The magazine's freedom to publish such material is absolutely precious, as precious as any liberty you can name. The cartoons on Twitter, however - just two or three in forty-four years of weekly issues - mock members of a feared and stigmatised minority.

On the other hand, there were folks discussing, at length, what a dreadful racist and Islamophobic publication CharlieHebdo is. Some complained that the magazine has joked, in the past, about Muslims being killed. It was really hard to see that yesterday and not infer the belief that the dead cartoonists and others, their lives stolen from them in a terrifying manner, their families and friends faced with devastation, had it coming to them.

"It's just a joke" is very often a lie. Humour is like any other tool of communication - its uses are not morally neutral. It can bring people together and lighten the load. It can be used to speak truth to power - often in circumstances where a direct attack would be impossible or ineffective. Satire is an immensely powerful weapon against governments and institutions which resist straightforward criticism.

This is partly why freedom of expression is so vital, but that's not how the argument must be made. The argument must be made in the defense of things we don't like, opinions we wish didn't exist, the stuff that offends us. And some of that is also expressed in humour.

There's no hateful force in history that hasn't employed humour to single out its enemies, to humiliate and degrade people it wishes to dismiss, oppress or eliminate. Anyone who has ever been bullied or abused is familiar with humour's sharp edges and bludgeoning force. People who rape or beat people will joke about raping and beating people - sometimes while they're doing it. Bigots of all variety will get awaywith making jokes about the beliefs they would be condemned for expressing openly.

When I say get away with, I do of course mean that such people can sometimes say things without provoking censure or disapproval. Censure and disapproval are appropriate responses to words and pictures that offend us. Offense matters. But it never justifies violence.

It's no accident that almost every time a public figure is criticised for racist, homophobic or other bigoted speech, it's a joke. In a liberal democracy, there are many opportunities to express the most extreme belief you can think of - you just can't paint it on the side of your house or demand five minutes on BBC One. However, there are many views which are now, largely, socially unacceptable - like being racist, misogynistic or homophobic.

But tell a joke about a marginalised group and it's ambiguous. You can use the ugliest terms and explain it away as an accident, a momentary error of judgement. You can say, "I didn't mean it - it was a joke! Some of my best friends are black/ gay/ women/ whatever!" Or, if comedy is your trade, you can explain it away as simply doing your job; making people laugh. You can hold onto your progressive, nice guy, right-on credentials. You can dismiss objectors as humourless, thin-skinned and politically correct. You can laugh at them all the harder.

There's nothing inherently benign about humour in general or satire in particular. Satire can be fueled by hate and it can stir up hate. It can reinforce ideas that lead to violence or oppression.

But, crucially, it is not violence. It is an awful long way back from violence. It shouldn't be criminalised and it most certainly shouldn't be responded to with violence. Objection, argument, boycott, social and political pressure - we need to take humour seriously (I really hate that, but it's true). But the worst, most hideously offensive joke doesn't warrant a punch in the face, let alone being shot in one's place of work.

This cartoon by David Pope of the Canberra Times is entirely apt. Killing people because of the things they say or write or draw is as ridiculous as it is horrifying.